Alternative Ulsters: Conversations on Identity

By Mark Carruthers

Excellent. Thought-provoking. A must-read' - Belfast Telegraph 'Fascinating' - Irish Times 'Mark Carruthers has done something remarkably clever and refreshing . . . A very important book' - Belfast News Letter 'The best political book of the year' - Alex Kane Ulster is an ambiguous and complex place. With six of its nine counties in Northern Ireland and three in the Republic of Ireland, it is perhaps most readily associated with the Troubles of the past four decades. It is also, however, a place with a rich literary, musical and sporting heritage. Its people represent a surprising mix of cultural identities, religious ideologies and political allegiances. There is no one settled Ulster identity but as this collection of conversations bears out, there are many areas where experiences and beliefs overlap - even though people come from very different backgrounds and traditions. In Alternative Ulsters, the broadcaster Mark Carruthers interviews a wide range of high-profile writers, actors, journalists and politicians, each of them with an enduring Ulster connection. He uses his finely tuned skills as an interviewer to draw each contributor into a personal reflection on identity. The stories and experiences that helped shape and influence each of the thirty-six interviewees are presented here in a series of colourful, lively, and at times deeply moving exchanges. Together, these conversations with those who know the place best explore Ulster in the twenty-first century, revealing a freshness of thought and a richness of culture that rarely make the headlines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liberties Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909718494

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Ulster teems with apparent contradictions. It is Irish and it is British. Its inhabitants look to Dublin and they look to London. People speak English, Irish and maybe even Ulster-Scots. They are Protestant and they are Catholic. There is no dispute that a great deal divides these people, but arguably it is their Ulster inheritance that unites them.

There is one geographical Ulster of course, which stretches from the northernmost tip of Malin Head in County Donegal, through the heartlands of Mid-Ulster and County Antrim, right down to Virginia in County Cavan, which is a mere fifty miles from the centre of Dublin. But within that majestic sweep there are countless Ulsters, each of them with a multitude of experiences, perspectives and prejudices. And, as this ancient Irish province eases itself into the twenty-first century, its population of almost two million now includes a smattering of Portuguese and Polish speakers. They live and work alongside fellow citizens who are Muslims, Hindus and Bahá’ís, demonstrating that Ulster is no longer a place of just two faith communities.

This collection of conversations is an attempt to take the notional temperature of a place where identity tends to inform a great deal of the day-to-day civic debate. Much public comment has been made in recent years, for example, about an apparent growth in acceptance of the term Northern Irish in certain quarters where that has not traditionally been so, though it is easy to over-simplify the point. The commentator Malachi O’Doherty summed up his own position in a Belfast Telegraph article in February 2013:

When I tick a box that says I am Northern Irish, I am saying that my strongest identification is with this region and its people and that I want political stability here in a Northern Ireland that is connected to Ireland, Britain and Europe. I am saying that I see a decent prospect of that being achievable and that I put my political hopes in that future … As somebody who designates as Northern Irish, I am saying that where two large communal camps here obsess about identity over practical politics, I prefer politics to work and can compromise further on identity to achieve that.

The poet John Hewitt is widely acknowledged as someone who did much to advance the idea of regional identity. His idea of a hierarchy of values, touched on by Malachi O’Doherty, became something of a recurring theme throughout this project. In 1974 in an Irish Times symposium, ‘The Clash of Identities’, Hewitt set out his stall:

I’m an Ulsterman, of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I’m British. The British archipelago consists of offshore islands to the continent of Europe, so I’m European.

That ladder of identity appears to remain an attractive idea to many people today. What’s interesting, though, is the way in which people have their own ideas about how to order the rungs. Identity is an intensely personal notion and it’s something which people in this part of the world think about deeply. My challenge was to persuade three dozen public figures to discuss the subject on a very public platform.

What comes across very strongly in many of the conversations is that identity is not a fixed idea. Many interviewees talk about how their notion of it has changed over the years. Many also talk about how their identity still changes depending on where they are and who they happen to be with.

There are revealing admissions and anecdotes throughout the book – Peter Robinson and Ian Paisley confront their Irishness, Eamonn McCann admits he now relishes thinking of himself as Northern Irish, and Stephen Rea suggests that, despite his Irishness, he is, in essence, an English actor. Equally revealing is Brian Kennedy’s reflection on taking part in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations at Stormont and Jackie McDonald’s thoughts on his unexpected friendship with the former Irish President, Mary McAleese, and her husband, Martin.

Despite those demonstrations of flexibility, though, there is some evidence that for many people there is a bottom line; what was intriguing was to try to pin that down. So, how far would certain individuals have gone to defend their notion of Ulster? How far, on the other hand, would others have gone to pursue their notion of Irishness? There is a sharp irony, when you think about it, in loyalists being prepared to fight to keep Ulster British, while republicans have been prepared to do the same thing to secure Ulster’s place in a United Ireland.

There are also reflections on this place and its people from long-time observers who are not themselves Ulster-born. Mary Peters embraces her adopted homeland warmly, Jennifer Johnston takes a dim view of political progress in the North, Peter Taylor casts an expert journalistic eye over the loyalist and republican communities he knows so well, and Simon Callow recalls his early days of political activism as a student at Queen’s University.

On a personal level, I hold no firm view on the notion of Ulster identity, but I do think it provides a useful entry point into a deeper examination of the wider subject. Hence, each conversation in this book begins with some consideration of Ulster and what it means to the interviewee, but after that, each discussion charts its own course through the experiences and reflections of the individual. Furthermore, it strikes me as a timely opportunity to test the temperature of the water, not least since devolution in Northern Ireland is beginning to bed down and, across the island, commemorations continue as part of the Decade of Centenaries.

The fact that each interview in the book was, without exception, a sit-down, one-to-one conversation guaranteed a much deeper level of engagement than would otherwise have been the case. All of the interviewees were quick to overcome any reservations they might have had about baring their souls on the subject. Without exception they have been candid in the thoughts they have shared with me, whether we were enjoying lunch or coffee together in Belfast, Derry, Dublin, London, or even Rome or New York.

Drawing up my final list of interviewees was, not surprisingly, a huge challenge. My long list was comfortably in excess of 120 names. The final list of thirty-six was settled on after careful thought and discussion with my publisher and with several close colleagues and friends. It turned out to be something of an organic process, but I did want to try to ensure that the final collection of contributors represents as broad a range of opinions and experiences as possible. I make no claim that this list of interviewees is in any way definitive, but it does, I believe, represent a substantial and diverse cross-section of views. It is the case that many of those I have spoken to for the book are well-known, but this is not simply a compilation of celebrity conversations. The contributors are, without exception, public figures with interesting and challenging things to say on a subject which demonstrably matters to them. I hope that some of the views they volunteer will run counter to what the reader might be expecting.

No two conversations in this book are the same, but each one starts with the same question: what does Ulster mean to you?

GERRY ADAMS

A leading figure in Irish republican politics since the late 1960s, Gerry Adams was born in Belfast in 1948. He was interned in March 1972 but was released several months later to take part in abortive secret talks with the British government. He has consistently claimed he was never a member of the IRA, though this is disputed by several leading historians and commentators who maintain that he was part of the group’s leadership since the 1970s. He has been the President of Sinn Féin since 1983 and served two periods as an abstentionist MP for West Belfast – 1983 to 1993 and 1997 to 2011. He was elected to Dáil Éireann as a TD for County Louth in 2011. An influential figure in the Northern Ireland peace process, he survived an assassination attempt by UFF gunmen in Belfast in 1984.

We meet in his office in Leinster House, the home of the Irish Parliament, in Dublin.

Gerry Adams:

I wouldn’t say I was an Ulsterman. I would say I was Irish first of all, and if I was asked where I was from, I would probably say I was from Antrim. I still like the line in the song that says, ‘An Ulsterman I’m proud to be’. I like that notional thing and clearly in rugby, or in any other competition where Ulster was playing, I would support Ulster. I would have a sense of the mythology of Ulster and I would see it as a province of Ireland, as opposed to a six-county province of England. I suppose if I was trying to figure out how I would see Ulster, it would be mostly in terms of the Ulster Championship in football. I love all the mythology and the folk history and the fables, but I don’t have a very acute sense of being from Ulster.

Mark Carruthers:

Have you ever considered the idea that what unites people from very different political backgrounds here is their common Ulster heritage?

I think that’s very true. Even when I’m talking to you I’m saying to myself, ‘when I say that I don’t see myself as an Ulsterman, is that strictly accurate?’ I’m quite comfortable in who I am, so I haven’t probably felt the need to hang my hook upon any particular description, but I agree with you entirely that what we have in common is that we’re from the same place. We share the same sense of being; of town, of parish and of city.

Do you think if you have a slight aversion to the notion of Ulster, it might be because it’s a term that has been so closely associated in recent decades with loyalism?

No, to be honest, I don’t have any hang ups at all about Ulster. I have a greater hang up about Northern Ireland; it’s still a term that doesn’t resonate with me, even all these years later. I had a very interesting conversation with a three year old grandchild recently and I was trying to figure out how this came about. She said to me, ‘Am I Irish?’ I said, ‘Of course you’re Irish’. She says, ‘Am I not English?’ I said ‘No, you’re Irish’. And she says, ‘Am I not just Irish when we go to Donegal?’ Now, I was trying to figure out how a three year old child would be coming to have a conversation about identity. Obviously they speak Irish at home and she’s doing Irish at her nursery school, so she’d be acutely aware that there’s other people speaking English. I thought it was really quite amazing.

When do you think you first became aware of your sense of identity?

I grew up in the Falls Road and I had, I think, a very acute sense of comfort in who I was through where I was from, without being necessarily able to define it in any particular way. I also went to the Christian Brothers’ school and they taught us hurling there. When I went to St Mary’s Grammar School I also met guys who weren’t from a working-class background, who were the sons of doctors, lawyers and architects. I dropped out of school and I went to work in a very traditional pub called The Ark, on the Old Lodge Road. Its customers were mostly working-class Protestant people who were the salt of the earth. I remember being there in 1966 during the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising and they slagged me because I was seen in a photograph at the Easter parade. I do remember that they had great sing-songs and I’ve always been very fond of music, so I was in a fairly unique situation of knowing all these Orange ballads because I was just interested in folk music and root music. So, when we would be out socialising and going to what we called a scoraíocht, which was just a house party, as a joke at the end of it we would have sung The Sash or Bold Orange Heroes of Comber, just for the craic. Ironically enough, I ended up leaving The Ark, which was owned by Catholics, because they wouldn’t pay me the union rate for working on the Twelfth of July!

So you were exposed to all of that but you still knew that you were different?

I was brought up in a house where there was a sense of national consciousness and of Irishness - but there wasn’t a lot of politics, as we would understand politics today. Both sides of my family were politically active going right back to my grandparents. In fact, my first education came from a man called Jimmy Graham, who was a member of the Communist Party. When I went to work in The Duke of York [in which the Communist Party of Ireland met], Jimmy Graham, Jimmy Stewart, Edwina Stewart and Betty Sinclair were all CP members and there was a whole gang of shipyard men. It was Jimmy Graham who gave me my first copy of the writings of James Connolly [the Irish republican and socialist who was one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising] and it was only then, when I started to read it, that I started to get some sense of what republicanism was about. I started to realise then, that there were acute political differences between me and people who I was very friendly with. The Duke of York was actually a huge education for me; it was a really wonderful establishment. The News Letter people were there, Sam Hanna Bell [the writer] drank in the place, the Labour Party’s office was in Waring Street so you had them drinking in the place. The shipyard guys were in the main bar with the CP guys and they would sing working songs. Then, in what was called the lounge, they would have traditional music. That was my first contact with people who were essentially Protestant but who would have come to Dublin, who would have supported Ireland in the rugby or who would have gone to Donegal and had a slightly different take on things.

It was around this time that you joined the civil rights movement and you also became drawn into Sinn Féin politics in the late ’60s as well. What was the tipping point that turned you from being a bystander into becoming politically involved?

The first awakening in a real sense was the Divis Street riots in 1964. I was still at school and I was staying with my granny at the time in the Falls. You know the story – it was an election and Ian Paisley was threatening to come and take the tricolour out of the window. So I went and got a copy of the Special Powers Act and read it and was quite fascinated by it. What influenced me? Two things – one: reading what I have just described, starting to get a wee bit of a context of why we were living in houses which had an outside toilet and a cold water tap. I was now meeting with people who were living in decent houses and who were professional people. They were people who might not have been very wealthy but who were white collar workers – and you started to get some sense of class politics and some sense of the social dimension to all of this. But also I was influenced by what was happening internationally. This was anti-Vietnam war time, so I went to those protests. It was the anti-apartheid movement, so I went to those protests. It was Bob Dylan, it was the Rolling Stones, it was the Beatles, it was the student protests across Europe and it was the American civil rights movement. By now I’m politically active and I’m working with kindred spirits.

What drew you specifically to physical force republicanism, though, when you could have gone down the road of constitutional nationalism or Labour politics?

What made me come around to support physical force republicanism, I suppose, was the developing way that the civil rights demonstrations were being dealt with. Then there was the militarisation in 1969. In my own home place of Ballymurphy, which would probably be one of the strongest Sinn Féin heartlands now, it was just a small handful of republican families then. A lot of the people were British ex-service – but the troops did what troops do, which isn’t even their fault. That’s what they were trained to do and they were an occupying force and this was the place in which I lived. They took over the local church hall, they took over local schools, they took over football pitches and, within a month, they were beating people in the streets and making lewd remarks about womenfolk. At this point, I’m sort of well-versed in all of the teachings of those who would espouse physical force – Pádraic Pearse [Pádraig Pearse, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising] or Connolly or Fintan Lalor [the influential nineteenth-century Irish revolutionary and writer] – but I don’t think anybody had a big plan and I think republican activism was fairly divided on these issues. There was a big split in 1969 but I think once politicians – and I’m talking here about the establishment – once they hand the problem over to the generals, then that’s the death of diplomacy, that’s the death of dialogue. I think that’s always a mistake that’s made in these situations.

So you’re saying that’s what the British politicians did and then that forced you to take the steps you took?

Don’t get me wrong, I have my own responsibilities; I wasn’t forced. I could have decided not to be involved. I could have decided to take some other course. Obviously I was a physical force supporter, but I was never taken to it as anything other than a means to an end, you know. I thought you could still argue a legitimate response to the political conditions in which we lived, and I would argue very strongly that the way you change these circumstances is by changing the political conditions. You can’t blame the people – it’s the political conditions in which the people live that lead them to take whatever decisions they take.

Your colleague Martin McGuinness has talked publicly about his involvement with the IRA and yet you continue to claim that you were not a member of the organisation. Why do you still say that, in spite of the fact that a lot of people who have studied the period and written about it are convinced that you were?

Well, that’s my position. I’ve never tried to distance myself from the IRA. I think the IRA was a legitimate response to what was happening at the time. I’d be critical of some of its actions, of course, but I think in terms of the militarisation of the situation and given the history of the island and given the physical force tendency within republicanism, there was almost bound to be that sort of a response. But, I mean, my position is quite clear and people can make up their own mind about the validity of it.

But can you see how people struggle to accept that because you were interned, for example, in 1972 and the IRA insisted that you be released to take part in the Cheyne Walk talks with the government?

I quite honestly don’t think that people care.

Well, some people do care.

Yeah but the vast majority of people will say, ‘Ok, so he wasn’t in the IRA’. Or people will say, ‘Well, I don’t believe that but, you know, he’s saying what he’s saying for whatever reason he’s saying it’, and they go on about their business.

Maybe that’s true, but what some people might wonder is why you can’t do what Martin McGuinness has done and say, ‘Look, I was involved at the time. I would be lying if I said I regretted what I did, but we’ve all moved on’. You could say that as well, couldn’t you?

Well, Martin and I have different positions on this and if I was to have the power to choose a different life journey, I wouldn’t choose a different life journey.

You wouldn’t do anything differently?

No, that’s not what I’m saying. I wouldn’t choose a different life journey. But I do regret many of the things that happened, you know.

Do you regret any of the things that you were responsible for, any of the decisions you took?

Well, I like to think of myself as a thinking human being. You’d have to hold it up to scrutiny and say, ‘Would I do things differently?’ Yes, as a visitor to these shores said, ‘there were things that were done that would have been better not done’ – that’s what Éilís a Dó said when she came, that’s what Queen Elizabeth said. I’m paraphrasing what she said. So, of course, I do think it is absolutely regrettable that there was a war. The more you think about it, it’s absolutely regrettable that so many people were killed, injured or traumatised. And then, at the same time, when you think back into your own place, there were all these very fine young men and women, and those who were not so young, who were absolutely courageous in terms of the stand they took and the stand their families took, whether it was visiting prisons or years of demonisation, of poverty and of real harassment.

I suppose what some people might say is that there didn’t have to be a war.

Well, let me answer that in two ways. It’s very easy to be blasé and to say something that doesn’t take into account the actual awful suffering that people have endured as a result of the war. So I don’t want to in any way make little of any of that. I’m just trying to say that while I regret the fact that there was a war, at the same time I have nothing but admiration for some of those fine people who took a stand and who reared their families and remained dignified and who never lost their humanity. Now, I know some people did lose their humanity, but I think that the people who came through all of that and who wanted to make peace, wanted somebody to break the cycle – and I think we succeeded in doing that. But yes, I can’t contradict anything that you have said. Yes, republicans inflicted [things] not just on English soldiers or those who were part of what would be seen as the British war effort, but [also on] innocent civilians; people who were just going about their ordinary business. That’s a matter of huge regret, of course it is.

Interestingly, both Peter Robinson and Ian Paisley, in their interviews for this book, say they don’t think they could have done what they did if they hadn’t been dealing with Martin McGuinness. There is a sense that they warmed to him in a way that they didn’t warm to you. Do you regret that in any way?

Well, first of all, Martin is very sociable, very affable, very outgoing. I didn’t know his father, but I knew his mother very well and I think he takes a lot of that from her. But look, Martin has brought his own very particular talents and I think he has been an example to all of us; but the unionists would have done business with whoever they would have had to do business with, whenever it came to it. Because of Martin’s particular personality, I think it was perhaps easier. I watched the relationship between him and Ian Paisley because Martin was always respectful for an older man. You could see that even in terms of some of the body language between them. There was almost a deference, while at the same time Ian Paisley might have been referring to him, his deputy, in a slightly ironic way. Martin took that with a certain degree of grace but I was involved in all of the negotiations and that’s what decided the dispensation that we worked out. It fell on me, as leader of the party, to choose whoever we were going to nominate, and I very consciously nominated Martin because I thought he was the best man for the job, and I think that’s proven to be the case. He’s grown into the job.

Do you think you would have found it difficult to have had that warm relationship with Ian Paisley? Would you have found it difficult to be deferential?

No, I actually came to like Ian Paisley very much. I formed two opinions. I formed an opinion that it was going to be extremely difficult to sustain a peace process with David Trimble [the former UUP First Minister]. No harm to David, but he couldn’t deliver his own people. Time [and again] David would have come to an agreement with us and then would have gone off and couldn’t bring his own party with him. So, in the course of that I said to our people, ‘I think we’re going to have to do a deal with the DUP’. There was a time when we would bump into the DUP and they would blank us and they would say something disparaging about us to whoever was in their company, and then there was a sense that some of them were actually listening to what we were saying. I remember very well that I was in Dublin one Friday night and Tony Blair phoned me and said to me that Ian Paisley had come to him and said he was prepared to do a deal but he couldn’t do it now. I said to him, ‘Tell him that isn’t good enough and tell him to come and see us’. I remember Blair coming back the next day and saying, ‘Paisley’s prepared to talk’. He was always good humoured, always respectful and wise. I remember him saying to me at Stormont, ‘What we need to do is come into a room like this, close the door, talk about the problem and solve the problem because that’s what the people want’. I went to an event in honour of Ian Paisley in Hillsborough and when I was leaving, Mrs. Paisley – Eileen – was sitting on her own and I said, ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ We talked for an hour about growing vegetables, about grandchildren, about faith and about dogs. My wife was sick not long after that and she sent her over a lovely little note.

What do you think the Gerry Adams of thirty years ago would think if he heard the Gerry Adams of today recounting stories about sitting talking to Ian and Eileen Paisley?

Well, I formed a kind of hard-headed view that Ian Paisley had never been challenged and that there was a bit of a showman about him. Nobody had actually said, ‘Come on, let’s try and sort this’, and maybe there’s a tide in the affairs of men that you can’t plan and you can’t plot and you can’t legislate for. But as it came to it, Ian Paisley became absolutely indispensable in moving the entire process forward. Would a teenage or a twenty year old Gerry Adams have looked with astonishment at the journey we’ve all been on? I suppose the younger Gerry Adams would say, ‘What exactly is this guy doing at this point?’ I have always, despite some of the awful things that have happened, had a sense that this has always been about politics and that politics essentially has to be about empowering people. So even though I supported the IRA, supported armed struggle and so on, I never saw that as being republicanism, you know. It was a tactic. Republicanism is about people’s rights, it’s about a society in which people are sovereign and it’s about people having entitlements. It’s about harmony between orange and green on this island. It’s about tackling sectarianism. It’s about all of those things.

But you still have to shoulder the fact that while republicanism might well be about all those things, it was a very painful ‘tactic’ for a lot of people here for a very long time.

Yeah and I don’t want to repeat myself. I acknowledge that. I’ve been imprisoned on a few occasions, I’ve been beaten in prison, I’ve been beaten in interrogation centres and I’ve been shot. I’ve met more victims of the IRA and families of victims of the IRA than perhaps anybody else. That’s, I think, part of my responsibility. When people want to deal with these issues and want to try and get closure and want to try and get beyond the trauma of what happened to them in the middle of the conflict, I think that people like me have a responsibility to help them.

Is that responsibility a burden on your shoulders? Does it weigh heavily?

Yes, it can. But whatever we have been able to do on those issues, the grace with which many of those people respond makes it worth it. Now, there are some people obviously who – and it’s quite understandable – hate republicans; hate me, hate Martin McGuinness, hate other people because of what they have gone through. But there are other people who have suffered grievously, who are very strong supporters of the peace process and who are very strong supporters of Sinn Féin. There’s a complexity about victims. A lot of victims come from republican families. Victims of the IRA come from republican families and it’s uplifting to see how people can remain strongly republican or remain committed to the notion of a peace process and support those like myself, even though the IRA might have robbed them of a mother or a father or a brother or a sister. It’s indicative of just how redemptive the human spirit can be. These are just decent people who have decided that they are going to forgive what happened and get on with their lives – and you’ll never read about it or see it, but they are the people who relieve the burden that some of us might have.

Do you think your sense of identity has been altered by being a TD for Louth and being based in Dublin? Has that cast a new light on your identity in any sense?

Well, it’s different, you know. We’re in Leinster House and it’s a very dysfunctional parliament and it’s quite partitionist. I go into the Dáil chamber and on the balcony there’s a bust of James Connolly and all the founders or leaders of republicanism. As you go into the big reception in the old part of the building, you’ll see both sides of the Civil War – I think Cathal Brugha is up on one side and Michael Collins is on the other side. When we first went up into Stormont, I felt the way I imagined those anti-apartheid activists must have felt when they went into the parliament in South Africa, because we weren’t really welcome. And then wee funny things happened, like our folks [at Stormont] organised a Christmas party and they brought in a bit of Irish music and a few drinks, and they invited everybody from the domestic staff, to the cleaners to the security staff and the people who enjoyed it most were the wee working-class, loyalist people who stayed at the session and had a bit of craic. Then a guy came over to me – one of the security guys – and he said to me, ‘You know, I was in the British Army when you were arrested, when you got the crap beaten out of you, and I’m sorry’. And when I left, he put out his hand and we shook hands. So, there’s a sense in the North of it being a work in progress.

LORD ASHDOWN

Born in New Delhi in 1941, Paddy Ashdown spent his formative years near Donaghadee in Northern Ireland, where his father owned a farm. He attended two local schools until, at the age of eleven, his education took him to England. He served in the Royal Marines – during which time he saw service in the Far East and on the streets of Belfast – before working for a time in Switzerland for the Secret Intelligence Service. In 1983 he became a Liberal MP and led the Liberal Democrats from 1988 to 1999. He entered the House of Lords in 2001 and served as the international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006. In April 2007 he was appointed to head a strategic review of parading in Northern Ireland.

We meet for breakfast in Belfast.

Paddy Ashdown:

I think Ulster means for me: my childhood, my antecedents, my blood, my mother in particular, who was an Ulsterwoman, and my grandfather. It’s something more, I think, to do with heritage and tribe than anything else.

Mark Carruthers:

And is it something which, having lived away from this place for so long, still has some meaning for you?

Yes, it does. It has importance. I suppose that’s the same as meaning. You know, it’s part of my identity and a part which I both recognise and feel proud of. I suppose if you listen to me speaking you’ll realise that most people don’t take me for an Ulsterman, although I can put it on when I need to. My parents sent me to school over the water, as we used to say, and that rubbed out the Irish accent and I’m sad about that actually. I really am sad about it, because it takes away a bit of your identity. In that sense, I suppose I am, in part, an Englishman, although there isn’t much English in my blood. But significantly, the choice I made was the choice that identified me as an Irishman, albeit not in most people’s knowledge, a Northern Irishman. In England they don’t know the difference. Paddy is not my name; Jeremy is my name, the name my parents gave me and always called me. Paddy was what my nickname was at school. It’s not a synthetic thing that it continued to be my name for the rest of my life, because so many of my school friends went into the same Royal Marines unit I went into, so the Paddy carried over. I’ve always found myself very content to be known as that. I am somebody who is proud to be associated with his Irish roots. They are Northern Irish roots in this case, so it has